The Man Who Tokenised The World

David Bowie was a genius. That is a word that gets bandied around all too lightly these days, but in his case it is entirely justified. And not because of his music, as brilliant as it is. No. Bowie was a genius because he understood the future. When looking at how the internet was developing, he famously predicted the end game: streaming. Indeed, he said at the time that music would become “like water” piped into our homes.

(And his music was indeed brilliant: Aladdin Sane was the first album I ever bought with my own hard-earned cash, Ziggy Stardust was part of the soundtrack to my college years and “Heroes” is one of my all time favourite songs.)

Not only did Bowie predict the future, he monetised it. In what I am convinced that future economic historians will surely highlight as one of the weak signals for change to a post-industrial economy, he created the Bowie Bond. This was a 10 year, 7.9% self-liquidating bond backed by the revenues from all of his music prior to 1993. The value of this over a decade was estimated at $100 million and stamped as AAA by credit rating agencies. Then, in 1997, these bonds were sold to Wall Street. Whether Bowie knew that this valuation was nonsense or not I couldn’t say, but he made $55 million from the bond sale. A few years later, the bonds were trading as junk. Bowie, as it turned out, was smarter than the bond market.

Ten years ago I wrote about the Bowie Bonds when I was thinking a lot about private currencies and digital money. It had occurred to me that those $1,000 Bowie Bonds were a shade away from being a form of Bowie Bucks and that if they had been issued as some kind of digital bearer instrument (DBI, or what many people now call “tokens”) then would have been a form of repetitional currency. I said that while it might seem strange to imagine trading in Bowie Dollars that are simply units of Bowie bonds, why not? As I noted at the time, it would be no different to trading with Edward de Bono’s “IBM Dollar” (in that it’s a claim on some future asset) or a similar instruments.

At the time, of course, I did not know that the shared ledger revolution was around the corner, so I imagined that Bowie Bucks would be implemented either in decentralised hardware (a la Mondex) or centralised software (a la Digicash). Now we have another and more appealing alternative to deliver the currencies of the future: tokens trading on shared ledgers. If Bowie were here today, I’m sure he would be discussing a token sale rather than a bond sale. But on what platform? Do the permissionless public ledgers work as a platform? Or do we need institutions to create permissioned ledgers with service-level agreements? How exactly will the money of the future work?

I’ll be talking about this world of cryptomarkets, cryptoassets and cryptocurrencies at the 3rd Nordic Blockchain Summit at Copenhagen Business School on Friday, so I look forward to seeing you all there. I’m genuinely keen to learn more in this space interested your spectrum of view on tokenisation and such like. Don’t be shy with the question.